CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY AND STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Noncoding RNA folds into intricate shapes that determine its function, but the rules of nucleotide patterns that determine these shapes are largely unknown. Now, an online game that tasks users to manipulate nucleotides until they fit real RNA shapes is rapidly uncovering those rules, using the brain’s innate ability to recognize patterns and its flare for intuition.
Players of the game EteRNA are given a real-world RNA shape and asked to manipulate a chain of nucleotides to fit that shape, by observing how different patterns of nucleotides form certain structures, like loops or tails. Then, every week, a few molecules are selected for synthesis in a lab at Stanford to see how closely they match the desired shape.
Before EteRNA came along, software algorithms for ...
